


Spring, 1856

by eudaimon



Category: Jacob's Dream (Song)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:36:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Spring of 1856, there was still snow on the mountains when two small boys wandered away from home.  Death was with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spring, 1856

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabaceanbabe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/gifts).



> God, this broke my heart to write. I hope it was what you were hoping for! Merry Christmas <3

To begin with: I was with them. All of them. I was with their mother in her kitchen, I was with their father on the hidden path in the wood that only he knew. And I was with the boys, the little boys who went wandering. They wanted to follow their father, like so many sons before them; sons who left home and crossed oceans or muddy fields never to return.

I was with them all.  
But I went with the boys. They thought that they were alone as they tried and tried to find that path that they had never been taught to follow. They thought they were alone, but I was three steps behind them, all the way into the wood.

I have always wanted to be closer to humanity than I am.

I know what you're thinking: why didn't I save them? Why didn't I nudge them back in the right direction, back towards the warmth of their mother's kitchen, and the creatures made from snow in the place in front of the house?

It wasn't my place. Humans make their own paths and I'm always there at the end of them. That is the way that it has always been and that doesn't change because George and Samuel Cox wandered too far from home.

I am a watching, waiting creature and I was created with a very particular purpose in mind.  
I have no heart for a reason.

If I had a heart, though, it might have broken for those little boys by the time the sun was going down. They wandered miles from home, too far to hear the shouting that was raised and too far to see the flickering torches carried by the men in the village. George, because he was older, tried to be brave for Samuel, wrapped one little arm around him as they walked. Sam stumbled.

They sat down together in the snow, bent their little heads together.  
And that was the first night.

Sometime in the night, Samuel prayed or (at least, I thought he did). It was a flood of words and he didn't press his hands together, keeping his arms around his brother instead. The words tumbled over each other _Mommy, Daddy, cold_ and _hungry_ , _tired_ and _sore_. He whimpered but no tears fell.

The worst thing: that there is still snow on the ground in the mountains at that time of year.  
The two worst things: that there is still snow on the ground in the mountains at that time of year, and that they were so, so small.

There was a little life left in them yet. I cupped my hands around them and tried to keep them warm. They were like a flickering spark in all of that darkness. George wrapped his arms tight around Samuel and locked his fingers. And I stayed by their side.

(I stayed and yet I was gone, too. I was there with their mother, as she kept a sleepless night, feeding fuel to the range without seeing it, waiting for the men to come home. I was with the father on the hillside as he stared into the fire that he hoped his sons would see, the fire that was too far from them to warm their tiny bones. And I was with Jacob Dibert when he lay down to sleep beside his pretty wife, the shape of their baby just beginning to show against the inside of her nightgown.)

He dreamed the same thing for three nights. He dreamed that he went walking through the mountains and that he found the two boys, the Cox boys, huddled close next to a log.

On the first night, he dreamed that George leaned in and kissed Samuel's cheek.  
On the second night, he dreamed that they were whispering to each other, hoar frost thick on their eyelashes.  
On the third night, he woke up weeping and would not be comforted.

Dreams are strange things; it is sometimes difficult to believe that they must contain a grain of truth, or direction. With his head resting against her chest, Jacob described the dream to his wife. She was born on the other side of the mountain, to the east, and she recognised the place.

He laced up his boots and left at first light, walking in the opposite direction to the nearly thousand men who were missing their third day of work to search for the boys.

And I went with him.

Listen: that was a hard time to be alive. Humanity has always been good at laying traps for itself and in recent years, modern times, they've got better and more devious, but back then the world was wild too.

What chance did those boys stand, in the midsts of snowy spring?

It was the saddest thing in the world. He found them lying on the east side of Pop's Creek, just like his wife had told him. He found them lying buried in the snow and rotting leaves in the lee of an old birch tree. Its silvered bark was cracked and peeling. Their eyelashes had frozen together. Their little noses almost touched. Jacob was only nineteen years old himself; his first child was barely an acorn at the heart of the woman that he loved.

He was nineteen years old; how could he possibly understand?  
He knelt down carefully in the snow and tears dripped from the end of his nose and onto the boys' clothes.

I have no tears to shed; it was a kindness on the part of whoever introduced me to the world.  
If I started, I might never stop. I have no time for weeping.

As he paused, wiping tears away with his cuff before he wrapped them both in the blanket for the long, slow walk home, I stood behind him and I let both of my hands rest on his shoulders. It is true that human beings fear death like they fear other things with teeth. In that moment, I gave Jacob Dibert a vision of his death, which would be quiet and gentle and happen to an old, old man, a long, long way from here.

I hoped that he was comforted.

He carried the bodies away with him, home to a mother and father who would lay them in the earth and weep for a long time before they were done. They had other children but they never forgot their first and Jacob Dibert's wife gave birth to a baby girl in the spring.

On the hillside, I stood with the two small boys. They looked up at me. The frost in their eyelashes melted and ran down their faces like tears.

“Who are you?” asked George.  
“I am the End of these things,” I told him. “And you should come with me, now. And we'll go many places together and I will show you what comes after.”  
“What about Mama and Papa?” asked Samuel.  
“I will take you to a place where you can meet them,” I told him. “But not yet.”

They took each of my hands in one of theirs.  
And I imagined that they might warm me, as we went away together, side by side.


End file.
